Dallas Mavericks Blog

Former Maverick Erick Dampier now with Heat

When Erick Dampier first saw the players’ parking area at AmericanAirlines Arena, he was less than thrilled. Like many of the hallways around the Heat locker room, the sides of the garage are covered in pictures.

Pictures, that is, of Miami’s win over Dallas in the 2006 NBA finals — when Dampier was a member of the Mavericks.

He’s with the Heat now, and even though he’s endured the ignominious fate of going from a starter for much of the second half of the regular season to being out of the postseason rotation entirely, Dampier is pleased just to have another chance to win the ring that slipped away from him in 2006 when the Mavs won the first two games of the series before dropping four straight.

Dampier played in 51 games this season, starting 22, and hasn’t appeared for the Heat since April 6.

“Being on a team like this, you have to sacrifice something,” said Dampier, who signed with the Heat in November after Udonis Haslem was injured. “I just looked at it as, I have to do whatever’s necessary for the team to win. … Being older, having played this game for a while, it’s only about getting an opportunity to win a championship.”

Seeing old friends on the Dallas side during these finals will not make the series emotionally trying, Dampier said. He’s with Miami now, and he made peace a long time ago with what happened in 2006.

“It’s all about us winning at this point,” Dampier said. “We can reference back to 2006 all we want to. That doesn’t mean a damn thing if we don’t win it this year. Those guys won it in 2006 and they deserved to win it. That’s how I look at it. Here’s our opportunity for us to win. We’ve just got to go out there and take advantage of it.”